“How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie”
I would not recommend this book. I started reading it once many years ago and gave up because I felt it was so obvious as to be useless. Everything mentioned essentially boiled down to “People don’t care about you, they care about themselves. Center everything about them and they will like you.”
In fairness, I was young when I read it, so perhaps there are subtleties I missed, but I don’t have a high opinion of the book. In addition, while I didn’t notice it when I read it (I was young, maybe early high school) I’ve been told it’s also quite misogynistic, which would bother me now if I read it.
There’s nothing revolutionary in this book, but if you can internalize and enact its recommendations consistently you’ll very likely be more effective in dealing with other people. Most people don’t do the things recommended by Carnegie, at least in the professional settings I’ve encountered.
As with many potentially useful tools, the effectiveness of the Carnegie approach rests entirely on actually applying it consistently. From this perspective I thought it was a well-designed book, and found it quite useful.
“How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie”
I would not recommend this book. I started reading it once many years ago and gave up because I felt it was so obvious as to be useless. Everything mentioned essentially boiled down to “People don’t care about you, they care about themselves. Center everything about them and they will like you.”
In fairness, I was young when I read it, so perhaps there are subtleties I missed, but I don’t have a high opinion of the book. In addition, while I didn’t notice it when I read it (I was young, maybe early high school) I’ve been told it’s also quite misogynistic, which would bother me now if I read it.
There’s nothing revolutionary in this book, but if you can internalize and enact its recommendations consistently you’ll very likely be more effective in dealing with other people. Most people don’t do the things recommended by Carnegie, at least in the professional settings I’ve encountered.
As with many potentially useful tools, the effectiveness of the Carnegie approach rests entirely on actually applying it consistently. From this perspective I thought it was a well-designed book, and found it quite useful.